Early career physiotherapists’ experiences of working with patients with dementia: an exploratory study

Purpose: Most studies in the allied healthcare professions addressing the interaction between practitioners and individuals with dementia have, to date, investigated domains where the practitioner is actively trained in the management of such encounters in their tertiary education, not least social work and hospital and residential nursing. Individuals with particular types and degrees of dementia are, however, highly prone to falls and a range of other health concerns that might also bring them within the remit of a physiotherapist. It is therefore, perhaps, surprising that comparatively little research has addressed the dynamics of practical, interpersonal work between physiotherapists and patients with dementia. Moreover, it remains unambiguous that contemporary physiotherapy education, in UK higher education at least, has seldom provided any substantial content on the diversified character of dementia syndromes, nor how a physiotherapist might constructively handle difficult emergent interpersonal contexts. Consequently, early career graduates are ostensibly expected to learn about these issues ad-hoc. Aggregating the concerns articulated above, this paper reports findings from an exploratory phenomenological qualitative study of early-career UK physiotherapists’ experiences of working with patients with dementia.